


Propinquity

by ScripStrel



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Childhood Friends, Crushes, Dialogue Heavy, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Homework, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon, Post-Squip, Random & Short, Recreational Drug Use, References to Shakespeare, Short One Shot, Stardew Valley - Freeform, Wingman Jenna Rolan, dating sims, video game references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-12-31 23:39:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18324302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScripStrel/pseuds/ScripStrel
Summary: Finally, she said, “What’s your friendship level with Jeremy?”Michael raised an eyebrow at her. “What do you mean?”“If it took you twenty hours to get Sebastian to ten hearts, where are you with Jeremy after twelve years?”Michael plays Stardew Valley and Jenna tries to play wingman.





	Propinquity

The thing about Michael and video games: he could never just be a casual player. His completionist lifestyle had started with Lego Star Wars way back when Gamecubes were a thing and he  _ absolutely _ needed to unlock every character and collect every minikit and get True Jedi on every level and find all the red bricks. And then he did it all over again when he and Jeremy did multiplayer. He got himself in  _ deep,  _ and usually couldn't get out unless he had every trophy and secret path unlocked. 

He was an achievement junkie. And he was addicted.

Open world games were so much worse. He'd fallen into a serious Minecraft spiral in middle school, because there was just so much to  _ do. _

And so Stardew Valley had sorta ruined his life lately. 

He was sitting in the school hallway, back against the bank of freshman lockers and laptop propped up on his knees as he clicked his way through watering this spring's seventh round of parsnips.

"You do realize this project is due tomorrow," Jenna said, glaring over his shoulder at the computer screen. 

Michael rolled his eyes. "King Lear can suck my parsnips," he said, shrugging her away. "It's a stupid speech. I'll just wing it."

Jenna seemed to be resisting the urge to hit him over the head with their No Fear Shakespeare book. "You can't just wing a class presentation."

"Watch me," Michael said, now chopping down a tree. "I've been doing it since Freshman year."

"We're supposed to be working."

"I  _ am  _ working. Look at all the work I'm doing."

"On your shitty 8-bit farm."

"Fuck off."

Jenna sighed and went back to watching Michael play. As he walked into his house, she leaned closer to the screen.

"Why is there another person here?"

Michael tried not to smirk too much. "Oh, you mean my  _ husband?" _  He walked over to the pixelated character. "He's a sweetheart. Say hi, honey!" he spoke to the screen.

Jenna raised an eyebrow at him. "Is this the same character you texted me about over the weekend?"

"Yeah, why?"

He could feel the pressure of her glare as she spoke. "As of Friday night, you were stoned off your ass and thrilled that he'd taken you to his special mountain top lookout."

Michael shrugged, more focused on the stream of text across the bottom of the screen. "Yeah, it's his ten heart event. It was sweet. He told me he'd never felt that way about another guy before and then we kissed and stuff."

"You're living vicariously through a glorified Harvest Moon game."

Michael fought down his nerdy desire to defend the integrity of different game franchises. "It was cute, okay?" he said. "You know I get emotional when I'm high."

Jenna knocked her head against the lockers and exhaled loudly. Okay, so apparently she was pissed, and Michael knew he probably shouldn’t be spending class time on a farm simulator, but school stress had been hitting him hard and he wasn’t sure he could focus on Elizabethan playwrights if he tried. Sorry Christine. Sorry Jenna. Sorry report card. 

“This is one of those games where you have to raise someone’s friendship level before you can do certain things, right?” Jenna asked.

Okay, so apparently less pissed and more resigned to Michael’s bullshit. He could deal with that. “Yeah,” he said. “It took me like twenty straight hours of gameplay this last week to be able to get married. I would’ve done it ages ago, but I was too focused on trying to finish the Community Center bundles.”

Jenna gave him a  _ look. _ It wasn’t a bad look, more like she was thinking really hard. Michael had only really considered Jenna a friend for a few months, and usually she was chill (word choice not intended but also not avoided), but sometimes she would look at him funny and he’d have a crippling desire to hide in his hoodie. She was still one of the most popular and intimidating girls in their grade, and she could end him and anyone else in two tweets. Jenna Rolan passing judgement was terrifying. 

Finally, she said, “What’s your friendship level with Jeremy?”

Michael raised an eyebrow at her. Not what he expected.“What do you mean?”

“If it took you twenty hours to get Sebastian to ten hearts, where are you with Jeremy after twelve years?”

Oh, so  _ this _ was where this was going. He wasn’t entirely sure which rumor mill had convinced Jenna of his feelings for Jeremy. He wasn’t even sure if there were legit rumors about it or if he was just that obvious, but as long as Jeremy was still oblivious, he tried not to let it bother him too much. 

“Jenna,” Michael said, choosing his words very carefully and scrolling through his in-game inventory in a vain attempt to distract himself from the fluttery feeling crawling up his throat, “I know I’m gonna sound like a hypocrite for this because video games basically  _ are _ my life, but real life doesn’t work like that.”

“Why not?”

He ran a hand through his hair, fighting the urge to rip it out. “Look, I can’t just make Jeremy magically fall in love with me by giving him every random quartz crystal I find.”

“No, of course not,” Jenna said, returning her gaze to the ceiling, which somehow had half a dozen pencils stuck in it. Apparently their school was full of twelve-year-olds. 

“Why did that sound sarcastic?”

“Just… you know…” Jenna smirked to herself, and dread began to simmer in Michael’s stomach. “You guys are close.”

“Yeah,” Michael said, “too close.”

“Oh, come on,” Jenna said, turning back to him. She fiddled with the pages of her script, flipping back and forth between acts. “You’ve heard of propinquity, right?”

Michael paused the game, setting his laptop off to the side. Fucking Jenna. “Please tell me you aren’t trying to convince me using the dating sim Game Theory from like three years ago.”

Jenna shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought he made some compelling points.”

Michael was about three seconds away from gouging his own eyes out à la what Cornwall did to Gloucester in act three of the play they were supposed to be writing a report on. This was bullshit. He shouldn’t have to defend his own damn choice to get over his crush in his own time. He didn’t need to risk ruining a lifelong friendship just because his heart beat a little faster when Jeremy was around, okay? 

“Yeah,” Michael said. “One of which was that if you make a move too late, you get friendzoned.”

Jenna glared at him. “The term friendzone implies that your only intentions are to get into his pants, which I  _ know _ isn’t true.”

Michael wasn’t sure whether the heat in his face was from the thought of wanting to have sex with Jeremy—a thought which would forever be kept  _ entirely _ to his bedroom with the door locked—or from Jenna’s… compliment? Yeah, that sounded like a compliment. According to her, he was a decent person, which was nice. She didn’t tend to think that about most people. 

He swallowed around the lump in his throat. “Can we just get to the book report?” 

Jenna’s gaze softened. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, I just thought—”

Michael shook his head. “No, it’s fine. I—” he swallowed again. “It’s just easier to ignore it sometimes, you know?”

They fell into silence after that. Michael half-expected her to push the issue, to badger him, but she turned instead to her phone, not even bothering with King Lear anymore either. At a loss of anything else to do, Michael resumed his game. 

Really, it was sad that he was putting so much of his emotional baggage onto a fucking farm simulator. It wasn’t even a real dating sim, and yet he was venting all his loneliness into the pre-written dialogue options and a 5,000g mermaid pendant. 

If only it were that easy with Jeremy. If he could just show up with a bouquet from the nearest grocery store and get Jeremy to date him. Because yeah, Jenna had a point. They were  _ so _ close. There were no more benchmarks to pass. No scores that still needed to grow. Michael had already seen all of Jeremy’s heart cutscenes. Hell, he’d been there for every major life event anyway.

And sure, the Squip thing had dented their friendship a bit, but it was long behind them. Losing friendship points here and there didn’t mean they couldn’t be recovered. 

But it was too late. They were  _ too  _ close. It would be the ultimate violation of bro-code. Michael knew Jeremy better than he knew himself. He knew Jeremy didn’t like him like that. Why would he? It would be like, basically incest, which just made Michael feel worse about the whole thing.

He went and talked to Sebastian again. There were no dialogue options left, so they kissed instead. The little red heart floating above his avatar didn’t do shit to improve Michael’s mood. 

“Who are you texting?” he finally asked, fed up with silence. 

“Jeremy.”

“Why?”

“Christine didn’t respond,” Jenna said with a shrug, “and I wanted Shakespeare help from a theatre kid. We still have to do this presentation tomorrow.”

Michael wandered about his farm for another minute. He cut some grass. He pet his cat (named Jeremy because why the hell not?). He sold a crap ton of crops. He picked the tulips that had just finished growing, thought about King Lear running through the wilderness covered in flowers, and wondered if that would be a good look on him.

To his admittedly shaky knowledge of the extracurriculars he wasn’t in, the Drama Club had done a miniature production of King Lear at some college workshop thing. He didn’t really know and he didn’t really care. What he did know was that he’d saved the video Jeremy sent him of the one scene he was in: act one, scene one. He played France, who was only in that one scene and only for a few pages. 

Meaning that while Jeremy knew more about the play than the average student in the lower-level English classes, he was by no means an expert. Not anywhere near Christine’s encyclopedic knowledge of everything Shakespeare down to her ability to tell you exactly what scene in Macbeth the “double double” shit was in (act 4, scene 1) as easily as she could recite it. Hell, Michael and Jenna already knew more about it than he did just by talking about it in class. 

So why was she still texting him?

“I told him you’re procrastinating bigtime,” Jenna said, seemingly reading Michael’s skepticism without him saying a word. “He says he’s not surprised.”

“Yeah, well,” said Michael, “I’m pretty sure he’s supposed to be in Trig right now, not getting on my ass about English homework.”

Jenna typed for a second, presumably passing the sentiment to Jeremy, because her phone buzzed in her hand again. “He says ‘fuck off.’”

Michael just flipped Jenna off, leaving her plenty of time to take a picture and send it to Jeremy as he headed off to the mines, and though he wouldn’t see it until much later via the screenshots, Jeremy replied, 

“I take it it’s mutual then. Lol, wish all things were like that.”

“What do you mean?” texted Jenna.

“...Have I told you that I’ve been playing a lot of dating sims lately?”

And Jenna was an honest enough friend to silently screenshot it and move on. They’d figure it out eventually. 

**Author's Note:**

> I realize that it might've been better to pick my poison with the allusions for the sake of simplicity, but I really liked both the SDV and the King Lear references even if they didn't work too well together, so they both stayed.  
> We need more good Jenna Rolan content. I'm not entirely sure I did her justice, but I tried. 
> 
> I adore feedback, so please feel free to tell me what you think!


End file.
